"Outside the window, there slides past that unimaginable and deserted vastness where night is coming on, the sun declining in ghastly blood-streaked splendour like a public execution across, it would seem, half a continent, where live only bears and shooting stars"

About Me

Thursday, 15 July 2010

A new arrival!

A short post to formally announce the birth of my adorable son Alexander Owen Douglas Treadway on 5 July 2010 at 18:08 weighing an eye-watering 9lbs 9oz. After a short stay in hospital, he and mum are back home and doing very well.

I don't plan to blog much if at all about being a parent, but I did at least want to mark the occasion, if only because a number of people have asked whether we have named him after the Buffy the Vampire character (as we intend to call him Xander) or Douglas Adams.

The first is a nice coincidence, the latter entirely deliberate. My wife liked my original suggestion of 'Douglas Adams Treadway' until she realised why it sounded so eerily familiar. However, she likes 'Douglas' as a name and we have a fantastic friend with the name, so from there on in it was plain sailing. (As far as the others go, Owen is a common name in Stef's family, and we just both really liked 'Alexander').

And that's all, except to say a further thanks to Mr Adams because it turns out that an affinity to his writing is extremely useful for the new father, as the following points should highlight:

Don't panic

Share & enjoy the experience

Time is an illusion (nighttime doubly so)

Babies think digital watches are a pretty neat idea. However, they also think that everything else is a pretty neat idea - so much so that they will listen in rapt attention to my dad's golf stories for hours on end.

A towel IS the most massively useful thing you can have. Partly it has great practical value, more importantly, a towel has immense psychological value as it can be of use in any emergency you will face. Any man who can rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with

Being at the birth of your child is, for the father, the closest equivalent to being plugged into the Total Perspective Vortex I can imagine. You are given just a momentary glimpse of the entire unimaginable infinity of creation, and somewhere in it a tiny little mark, a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, which says both "You are here". You also realise that you have absolutely no concept of what pain actually feels like"

I have observed that, as with Bistromathics, where "numbers are not absolute, but depend on the observer's movement in restaurants", so numbers surrounding the birth of a child are also relative, or non-absolute. The basic non-absolute numbers are the given time of the baby's arrival and it's expected weight. The more complex non-absolute numbers of visitors who say they are coming to see the baby and the time they actually arrive (which will bear no relation to the number of people who actually turn up and when they turn up). And the final non-absolute (and entirely imaginary) number is the total of cost of the baby, which can however be reliably estimated by multiplying by itself your initial expectation of what that cost would be.

Oh, and I just have to post the best, most lovely photo ever taken anywhere.